articy:draft

[h1]articy:draft SE v1.5.6 Review[/h1] articy:draft SE is a great tool to keep your game design stuff like ideas, storylines, character concept, dialogs and so on organized. The powerful dynamic node system works like a mindmap but with much more extras and custom modificiations. Sure, you need to invest time to learn the software and create your own custom assets first but once you are done. It will be much easier to sort out and update your game design stuff later since everything is now organized. Definitely worth the money imo!

A true masterpiece of game design when it comes to planning, structure, character & level design. It's not a drawing tool, but rather something what comes before and after that. I'd recommend it to any indie or professional game developer/designer, to at least have one of these in their team. It saves time and most importantly is visually relaxing(darker theme), not cluttered, compared to similar programs of this function. Price is just about right for what comes with it. It might seem expensive because it's on Steam. We're all used to video game prices which are 2-5 times lower than this product, but we forget to understand that we play each game for around 12 hours and then throw it away in the drawer(this case, Steam library). Articy is the universal tool, so it doesn't have any 'gameplay' value, you can't just throw it away. If this is the career path you're taking(game design, web comics, film industry, etc. etc.), you will get used to this tool easily. The features are awesome, but one flaw which bugs me out a lot is that I can't use the templates to have a lot of properties; I'm limited to a specific amount of rows. And since I focus a lot on character design and need to use lots of properties, I need to think of a way to cut it down in size. I'm using the first SE, not the second one, maybe it's fixed there, but other than that I don't have many reasons to upgrade to SE2 right now as I have all the features I need for game design and the web comic. Not to mention incredible politeness of some of the developers I had a chance to speak to. Customer Support is a top-notch Yes. I'll rate Articy 9.8 out of 10.

Game Making for CEOs who need to pretend they're working on the team when they're just pretending to do real work. Just input directly into the program that designs the game instead. Skip a step, save time and money. This program makes double work for the indy dev. If I had the time and money to plan like this it would be fantastic, but Articy isn't realistic for most people. In a group it could be amazing. However, Google is free and has all of these features one way or another. 100gb for 2$ a month is easier and I still have to backup articy to google or a cloud anyway. So, skip this program unless the team is already proficient with this software. If you have Excel, Word, and a Paint program, you can do everything here.

Best buy ever! Got this at a ridiculously low price and well, the hours used speak for themselves (although I tend to leave it on for days at a time so it's not actually that high, but it's pretty dang high). Actually use it for a sci-fi comic book series as it tracks locations, characters, races, etc., so I can have all the pertinent details in one place with some interconnectedness. Also I can add placeholder art and character art so as I'm reviewing, it's vaguely like reading the comic before it's even drawn.

This is a unique and thought-out tool. It's one of those tools where you either immediately recognize how useful it is, or you eventually will recognize it. It's mostly a design tool, but it's worth spending the engineering effort on importing Articy's XML or using its API, so design and authoring are one step and easily iterated. Additionally, why write a GDD in Word when you can generate one at will from specific properties, objects, features, and locations that will actually be in the game? Its concepts like Features can map directly to components or behaviors that make up your game objects, so it's really easy to translate from Articy to your engine, and can be automated. Basically, start here. Forget GDDs. Articy works best as the central master for everything about the game, and a GDD is just one of the things it can produce with a click. Not only do I recommend this tool, but it's almost irresponsible not to.

Short review. I use this for world building and it's an absolutely fantastic tool for organization, far better than any other I've run into so far. I highly recommend it.

I believe that many planning tools can't really beat a well organized spreadsheet. Articy:draft has proven to be an exception, at least for the type of project that can make full of most of its features.

good one for game design